So you get on the scales and urghhh you haven’t lost any weight even though you have now been working out religiously for the last 6 weeks! However, you maybe have scales which tell you your body fat % or you actually put some jeans on that feel a little looser around your waist. Hey presto – you may not have lost any weight but you have toned up and maybe lost some body fat. A Kg of fat is still the same weight as a Kg of muscle but the Kg of fat takes up a lot more space than the Kg of muscle – they weigh the same but muscle is denser.
What I say here is ‘You can not see your weight but you can see your size’. It may make sense to some people, but others are totally fixated on losing weight and get very despondent when they don’t. I generally know that when I lose weight it is because I haven’t been working out so much, so I have lost muscle mass rather than lost much fat. I try to encourage my clients to think about what size or what clothes they would like to get into rather than how much weight they have lost – does it make sense??
My aim here is to make you more aware of not thinking about weight as much but to think about toning up and eating a balanced diet. Try to think about being healthy rather than skinny especially as having more muscle mass also helps burn more calories as it takes more energy to make large muscles work.
Finally, I like this quote – though can’t remember where I got it from, but it sums it all up:
‘We should get healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to get healthy!’
